 Thirty years ago was a low point in my life. I was in the last semester as an economics major in college, and I was passing all of my classes, and then it hit me that I'm going to graduate, which means I'm going to have to leave college. And that realization was painful because I'm having such a good time at college in learning economics from some pretty good faculty, not Austrians, but pretty good. But to make matters worse, of course, the economy had experienced ten years of stagflation, two years of depression with unemployment above 10%, interest rates at 20%, and there were absolutely no jobs available in the American economy. So this was a problem because I had a pile of student debt and no job to pay for it. So I started thinking about that and looking for options. And it turned out that my best available option was to go to a graduate program in economics in Alabama. And of course all my friends thought I was nuts to select that option. But I did, and I decided, well, I'll double down on the government student loans, go down there and learn some economics. And it was an Austrian-friendly faculty at the time. And so I did it. And things didn't turn out the way I'd planned. The faculty really wasn't all that friendly towards Austrian economics. One of my professors told me the first day I was there that there really wasn't anything like an Austrian school of economics, that there were very few Austrian economists left in the world, most of them that were older, none of them were teaching at a PhD-granting institution. So the Austrian school was just something in history, something in encyclopedias, but it wasn't really an ongoing school of economic thought. And another one of my professors, who was an eminent scholar type of an economist, very well respected macroeconomist, told me after I said that I was interested in Austrian economics, he told me that the Austrian theory of the business cycle, which was really what I was pumped up on at the time, was a grisly embarrassment. So that was not another good thing to learn. Another discouraging thing to learn, besides having to learn a lot of neoclassical economics at the same time. So as the year wore on, I got more and more despondent about my choice to go to Alabama to get a master's degree. It was a master's degree-only program in economics at Auburn University. And towards the end of the semester, one of my professors pulled me into his office and he said, Auburn is getting a PhD program in economics. And I was like, really? And he said, yes. He said, and you have been accepted into the program. And I was surprised at that too. And he said, a guy named Lou Rockwell is moving the Ludwig von Mises Institute to Auburn University. And I said, no way. And he said that, that Lou was going to publish journals and books and he was going to have conferences and he was going to bring all of the leading Austrian scholars to Auburn to give talks. I said, you're pulling my leg. He said, no. And he said, they're going to give you a fellowship to pay for your education. And I was like, no way. So it was like all downhill for most of my life and then that one day, everything turned around. And everything has been much greater than I could have possibly imagined. The Institute did fund me through my graduate school, through writing a dissertation. I've worked with them in many different respects. I was the editor of the Austrian economics newsletter, an editor for the free market newsletter. I published in the quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, the Review of Austrian Economics, the Journal of Libertarian Studies and a lot of other things including publishing a few books with the Institute itself. So these are things that I could have never imagined ever happening in my life. I never could have imagined being put into this position and now I work full time at the Institute as a senior fellow. So it's really above and beyond any expectations I could have possibly dreamed up as a college student. And I want to thank everyone here and everybody who's supported the Institute over the last 30 years. And of course, most particularly, Mr. Lou Rockwell, who made all that possible.